


The Pumpkin Fic

by IllogicalBeast



Category: Phandom
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-28
Updated: 2019-03-14
Packaged: 2019-10-18 12:30:57
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,390
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17580890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IllogicalBeast/pseuds/IllogicalBeast
Summary: Everything is fine until Phil gains an odd obsession with pumpkins, filling his and Dan's house to the brim with the orange gourd. Is there a reason for this or has Phil simply gone crazy?





	1. Pumpkins

Phil twiddled his thumbs absently. Dan was across from him at the table, eating toast and scrolling through Tumblr. Phil had a little bit of trouble bringing it up, but that was mostly reluctanacy to break the silence.  
"Dan?"  
Dan looked up, giving Phil his full attention. "Yeah?"  
"We should get pumpkins for Christmas this year."  
"You mean Halloween?"  
"No. Christmas."  
Dan looked a little taken aback, "Care to explain?"  
"Well remember that one year where we forgot to get a Christmas tree?"  
Dan nodded.  
"And we used a pineapple instead?"  
"Yeah."  
"Well I just thought, maybe we should fill the house with pumpkins."  
Dan blinked. "There was no correlation between the preface of that sentence and the payoff."  
Phil rolled his eyes. "Nerd."  
"You're the one with an English degree."  
"Shut up."

At the store Dan felt uncomfortable. Phil still hadn't given him a real reason on why to buy these pumpkins, just instructions on how many pumpkins to buy (432), and what size they must be (at least 1 foot high and proportionately thick). Dan bought out all of Tesco's pumpkin's, they were on sale after Halloween. Dan bought out all of Asda's pumpkins, they were more expensive after Halloween. Dan had 4 taxi's full of pumpkins and Phil, the mailman, the taxi drivers, Ms. Picket from across the street, and a very adorable dog, all had to help carry in the loads of pumpkins. (The dog didn't carry anything, but she still helped by being there.

"Phil. What are we doing with 432 pumpkins in our house?"  
Phil looked up from staring at a pumpkin "431. You forgot one."  
"I COUNTED SO THROUGHLY!!!"  
"Yeah well you failed."  
"Phil?"  
"Mmm?" He said, still staring intently at the pumpkin.  
"Seriously why is this happening?"  
Phil was silent. He handed Dan a piece of paper.  
"What's this?"  
"It's a list of all the pumpkins that aren't acceptable, they need to be taken back."  
Dan skimmed his eyes over the page. "Jace, Bob, Susan. YOU NAMED ALL THE PUMPKINS"  
The paper unraveled to fall directly on a pumpkin and curl up there. This was so long.  
"Yeah, so just take back the ones highlighted."  
"HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO KNOW WHICH PUMPKIN IS HUMPHREY?" Dan gestured around them, to a world of pumpkins. A sea of orange. The bathroom was inaccessible, crammed with pumpkins, and the places where they stood were basically the only places where you could stand without smashing a pumpkin.  
"Did you not memorize our child's name's Daniel?" He was perfectly serious and Dan was actually a little scared.  
"Of course I didn't mean to forget which one's Humphrey, Phil."  
"Good. We'll take back the one's that won't work, as much as we love them."  
Won't work? Won't work for what?

As Dan dragged a giant garbage bag full of pumpkins out the door, Phil yelled something from the other room: "DON'T FORGET TO GET REPLACEMENT PUMPKINS WHILE YOU'RE OUT! WE CAN'T HAVE ONLY 396 PUMPKINS!" He giggled giddily from the other room and Dan's fear only grew.

It was days, almost weeks, later, when something else happened. Phil had been quiet, tiptoeing around the flooring of pumpkins, while Dan had been nothing but confused and distraught. Phil understood why he felt so bad, but it was necessary for the plan. The something else which happened confused Dan even more.  
Dan had been out for the day, shopping, although he had pointed out several times that they could just eat pumpkins, they had enough, to which Phil had glared at him intently and he had quickly backed off.  
When Dan got home he was immediately shocked. He turned the key in the lock, opened the door, and gasped. The house had been a mess of pumpkins. Once or twice Dan had stepped on a pumpkin, and Phil had thrown a fit. Screaming, crying, yelling. Dan was now very careful as to where he stepped.  
Dan opened the door, and saw, within: A messy pulp of orange pumpkins. They were all smashed. Dan felt faint. He took a couple steps inside. He called Phil's name. He fell down into a huge pile of sunset orange pumpkins.

When Dan came to he was in his bed, wearing his pajamas. Had it all been a dream? He sat up and looked around him. The room was full of pumpkins. Not-smashed, solid, pumpkins. Phil tiptoed in gracefully over the pumpkins. "Good morning Dan!"  
"I-" Dan didn't even know where to start. "It was real?"  
"Was what real?"  
Dan moved on quickly. "Why were all the pumpkins smashed?"  
"I would never smash our babies, Danny!"  
"Of course."  
"You must have had a bad dream is all, the pumpkins are fine. Come have breakfast!"  
Every pumpkin in the house was intact.

Later that same day: "Dan will you go get the laundry?" Phil was sitting on the couch between two pumpkins, another sat on his lap. Dan sat on the ground.  
"Yeah, sure." Dan stood up slowly and edged his way along the wall to the door.  
Dan loved getting the laundry nowdays. He could walk across the ground with little trouble, and even being away from Phil was comforting. It was only when he got to the washing room when he began to throughly hate laundry. There, on the rack, drying, was his white T-shirt. At least it had been white. That T-shirt, was clearly his. And it was bright orange.  
Almost like someone wearing it had fallen into a pile of pumpkins.

Dan was completely terrified. It wasn't like Phil was really scary, but he was off. His obsession with the pumpkins was obscure, counting them everyday, calling them by name, speaking to them as if they were human. Dan had considered more than once if he should call the police. He didn't. Dan hadn't spoke of the smashed pumpkin incident but he was certain it was real. It had to be. In this horrible nightmare of a knitted hat it was the only loose string.  
It was Christmas Eve. Dan was tense. They'd been offline since this had gone down, the last thing Dan having tweeted was: Phil just asked me to go buy an obscure amount of pumpkins, could this be for a video?  
Then silence.  
The internet was loud. Screaming. Theories about what had happened. But none of them really compared to what happened on Christmas Day: The year of the pumpkin.


	2. The Year Of The Pumpkin

Christmas Eve, The Year Of The Pumpkin, 3:27 am

Dan woke up in a cool sweat. The first thing he noticed was that the pumpkins were gone. The second thing he noticed was that he must be still asleep, as how someone could move so many pumpkins was a mystery, let alone why Phil would want to. The pumpkins must be somewhere. He closed his eyes. No pumpkins. He opened his eyes. No pumpkins. The pumpkins were gone.  
Dan got dressed and walked out of his room. The hallway was void of pumpkins. He peeked into Phil's room, the room was void of pumpkins. And of Phil. Dan felt a chill go down his spine. He heard a sudden noise from the living room and a squeaky voice calling his name. "No Dan don't come in here!"  
"What's happening Phil?"  
"Dan stay out there!"  
Dan really wanted to walk around to where he could see Phil, and probably the reason for all of this. But he didn't. "Phil, what's happening?"  
"Just go to sleep we'll talk about it in the morning."  
They wouldn't. Dan knew that. He had to do something. He reached over and pushed his bedroom door shut, so it sounded like he'd gone back to bed.   
It was very silent, then, a noise. Dan knew what noise that was, but he waited till it happened again to be sure. That was the noise of someone smashing a pumpkin.  
He didn't leave. He sat there, listening to pumpkins being smashed until what was probably around 6:30 am. Then Phil started talking. It was Phil's voice but low and droning, and it was most definitely not English. Dan remembered law school and all the Latin derivatives there. Yes. This was Latin.  
Phil didn't know Latin.  
Phil didn't obsess over pumpkins.  
Phil didn't lie to Dan.  
This was not Phil.  
Dan was torn. He had several options at this point:  
1: Call the police, say Phil's been acting weird, and get him in jail forever.  
2: Do nothing and possibly get sacrificed to the Pumpkin God.  
3: Try to stop Phil, save them both, and to get his best friend back. Or fail and get sacrificed to the Pumpkin God.  
Dan had always been indecisive, but the choice was clear. He quietly went back into his room and grabbed his phone from the nightstand. He dialed the number for the police. His hand hovered over the call button. He stopped and closed his phone. Maybe the choice wasn't as clear as he thought.  
He wouldn't get a second chance.  
When he woke up it was late into the afternoon and the house was quiet. The sun shone through the blinds lightly and Phil stood in the doorway to his room. "Hey Dan, good morning!"  
"Morning."  
"It's Christmas Eve!"  
"You excited for Christmas?"  
Phil's goofy smile fell off his face and he was more serious than Dan had seen him in a long time. "More than ever before."  
The pumpkins in the living room were all pushed as far as the side of the room but that wasn't that weird, what was weird was that some of them were colorless. Like they had been put into black and white, the pumpkins, probably about a third of them, were spread out evenly around the room.  
"Phil?"  
"Yeah?"  
"Why does this room look like it froze halfway through a paint by number?"  
"What?"  
"The pumpkins, Phil. They don't have color."  
Phil looked genuinely confused and the pieces of Dan that hadn't been torn apart over the past few months disintegrated into nothing. "Phil." Dan asked, almost pleading for a hint of the person he'd known and loved for so long. "Phil, please."  
Phil kept his confused look and Dan felt like one of the pumpkins around him, drained of color and life. He tapped his foot impatiently and he sighed. "Phil, what's wrong with you?"  
"What do you mean?"  
"Phil Lester, I mean what is with the pumpkins? What is wrong with the way you're acting? What the fuck is wrong with you?"  
Dan stood there until tears threatened to ruin the intense moment and Phil's oblivious face felt like too much.  
"You understand that this is weird, right?" Dan looked down. "Talk to me."  
Phil suddenly seemed sympathetic. "I promise it will all make sense on Christmas."  
"I heard you smashing pumpkins all night. And here we are with colorless pumpkins perfectly intact."  
"I can't tell you yet."  
"Tomorrow then?"  
"Yes."  
The rest of the day went as normally a day in the life of the pumpkin household went. Then they went to sleep.  
At midnight Dan woke. Phil was standing in the doorway to his room, screaming. It wasn't a scream of fear, it just kept going. Dan thought it was probably just to wake him up. It was Christmas, and sure enough, it was midnight on the dot.  
Phil stopped screaming immediately and smiled. "Hey Dan! Good morning!"  
"Care to tell me what in the fuck is happening today?"  
"Nope! Come into the living room. We're all waiting!"  
Dan walked into the living room. It was full of pumpkins. Colorless, almost black.  
"Touch one, Dan."  
Dan tapped one lightly and it melted into a puddle of black ink. He touched another one and it too melted. Dan swallowed hard. "Phil why?"  
"Santa."  
"What."  
"He's scared of pumpkins."  
"Phil. Santa isn't real."  
"Well I know that now!"  
"Why?"  
"The presents. They still came."  
"Oh."  
"So now I know you're Santa!"  
"Phil I didn't get you any presents this year, I figured you were too caught up in your pumpkins."  
"Haha, nice try Santa. But here's the thing." Phil started walking around Dan slowly. "You aren't scared of pumpkins."  
"Well after this experience I sure am!"  
"Yeah but the thing is, you couldn't have delivered all of those presents if you weren't scared of pumpkins yet. So I thought a lot and I figured it out!"  
"What?"  
"All of history, every present Santa's delivered. It hasn't happened yet."  
"What?"  
"So I studied for a while and I figured out how to send you back, how to make you Santa."  
"Phil don't do anything rash-"  
"I have to. To save Christmas."  
Phil began chanting quickly in Latin. The black pumpkins rose around him, floating in air, and circled around Dan. Dan screamed. The Latin was all he could hear, it echoed around his head. He fell to the ground and pumpkins flew at him smashing painfully against his side. Each pumpkin was less painful and as he looked down he discovered why. He was growing padding. Bright red, fuzzy, padding. A Santa suit.   
There were still pumpkins hovering around when the suit was complete and they began to grow. An elf. Another elf. Fifty elves fell to the ground around him and scampered off in different directions, scared. More pumpkins grew into reindeer and soon the house was full of Christmasy animals and people.  
There was a whirring sound and the apartment felt as if it was spinning in circles. The wind hit Dan's face and it stung until a white beard grew out of no where, catching the snow as it flew around on the air.  
Phil stopped chanting.  
The apartment landed.

Christmas, 1798, midnight.

Santa swept up the bag full of toys and sighed. He heard Mrs. Claus in the next room, knitting and humming an upbeat version of The Internet is Here. "I'm off!"  
"Have fun delivering toys, Santa!"  
Santa wasn't scared, he'd done this before a million times, and he'd keep doing it too. As he walked out the door he spotted something that really shouldn't have been there.  
"Hey can you clean up these pumpkins while I'm gone dear?"  
"Of course."  
"I hate those things."  
"I know."  
And Santa got on his sleigh, egged on his reindeer, and flew off into the sky.


End file.
